SOURCE: "Home as Heaven, Home as Hell: Uncle Tom's Canon," in Rewriting the Dream: Reflections on the Changing American Literary Canon, edited by W. M.; Verhoeven, Rodopi, 1992, pp. 22-42.

An American critic, novelist, short story writer, essayist, poet, and editor, Fiedler is a commentator on American literature who has generated a great deal of controversy. Using primarily Marxist and Freudian perspectives, he attempts to uncover the origins of modern literature and show how myth is used in literature today. In the excerpt that follows, from an essay originally published in 1982, Fiedler discusses the myth of marriage and parenthood shared by Stowe's female audience, examining its role in her antislavery argument and its influence on the novel's critical reception.

The myth which informs Uncle Tom's Cabin . . ., in which home, marriage, and mother are postulated as the greatest goods, belongs only to what I had been taught to regard as...